Menu

BBSing in the 618 area code

A long time ago, before the average household had a computer, computer enthusiasts used to connect to local computer systems called Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). Someone had the bright idea of calling them Bulletin Board Systems because they resembled community bulletin boards since you could post messages on them. The similarity didn’t go much further than that, though, since you could also chat, play games, download porn and slander your neighbors. BBSes were huge in the 80’s for the few people who owned computers. But the fad started fading away in the mid 90’s when the internet became popular. Today BBSing is more or less dead and you’d be lucky to find a local BBS in your area. Even if you do find one, it’s unlikely that many people call it anymore.

I got into BBSing in 1989 after I purchased my first computer with a modem in it. I quickly became a BBS addict and spent hours a day on local systems. Since BBS systems were reached by phone, I was limited to calling only BBSes in my local calling area. At that time, this meant I had to stick to East Alton, Alton, Wood River, Bethalto, Roxana and a few other local cities. But very soon after I became a BBS addict, Illinois Bell (our phone company at the time) increased the area’s local calling plan to include far-away cities such as Granite City, Belleville, Collinsville, East St. Louis and more. This more than tripled the number of local BBSes available in our calling area.

Today, you pay your internet provider a monthly fee to connect to the internet. Back then, BBSing was completely free. Some people tried setting up pay BBSes, but they never went over very well with the local community since there were several dozen free systems to choose from. So who ran these systems? Anybody with a home computer and a spare phone line could set one up. I even set up my own BBS called Hotel California for awhile. Most BBSes ran BBS software called WWIV, myself included. There were plenty of alternatives to WWIV, but for some reason everyone in 618 seemed to prefer WWIV. To connect to a BBS, you needed a terminal program (this is before anyone had Windows) and most people used either Telix, Procomm or Qmodem. Most people had either 1200 baud or 2400 baud modems, which is about 20 times slower than your 56k internet connection.

I was inspired to make this page as a homeage to 618 BBSing after I found a few old floppy disks full of some old BBS captures from the early 90’s. Eventually I’ll put some of those captures up somewhere on this page. I’ve also had a few people sign my guestbook over the past few years, making references to past 618 BBS systems. If you’ve found this page through a web search and you’re looking for a local community in the 618 area, you can either look at notla.com or on the Riverbend Community Yahoo club. If you’ve got something to contribute to this page or feel that I’ve left something out, feel free to contact me.

If you’re an ex-618 BBSer, be sure to join the Myspace and Facebook groups.

BBSmates.com You can search for old es on this site, by name, city, area code and more. There’s quite a few listings for old 618 area BBSes in there. There’s even a message board for each BBS so you can attempt to contact the people who used to run them.

618 Still Talking About PLA This is an article from 1998, written by that hard-core phreaking group The Dark Fluffy Phreaking Bunnies. Just a few posts from The Clip Joint, probably the last BBS to exist in this area.

PLA Issue 34 Most of this PLA issue revolves around several pointless BBS wars that happened in the summer of 1995. There’s the Greg Carson/Hitman incident, the Chatterbox BBS incident and some stuff about an old hacker BBS. It’s a lot of reading and probably not that interesting if you weren’t personally involved in the whole thing.

PLA Issue 35 This is a followup to the 618 BBSing PLA issue. More endless logs and details. There’s also a followup to the Greg Carson story 5 years later located here.

Here’s an old list of 618 BBSes, dated March 31, 1992. It was compiled by Brad H. Geisen, aka Bear1. Don’t try calling any of the phone numbers in this list because I’m sure all of them were reassigned years ago. A few other BBSes that you might remember were Hotel California, Wayne’s World, Chatterbox and APCi.

For one reason or another, there were a few guys in my high school that I wanted to prank. But I didn’t want to waste my own time making prank calls to them. So I came up with the idea of creating ads for a new BBS in the area that everybody would want to call. Then I would list the phone numbers of these guys I didn’t like and they’d get dozens of calls from people trying to connect to a computer system. I think I got a little carried away in the ad, talking about how great these systems were. I think I posted these ads mostly on Ray’s BBS and Fantasy Island. Here they are…

In this next file I found, I was trying to create what appears to be a legitimate ad for my favorite BBS which was called Fantasy Island. But for some reason I wrote that one of the features was pirated games which I'm sure was not a feature of that BBS. Who knows what I was trying to stir up...

6 comments

you have to weed through a bunch to find decent bbses, but it’s worth it.
Also check out http://www.myspace.com/bbses for more bbs information, especially for those
people that are using vista, you have to enable the telnet client.

I remember most of these boards. It was a great time back then. I used to run a board for a while, first one was on a Commodore 128 called The Viper’s Pit and the other was on a PC Clone called The Shadowrun BBS.

Guess it’s still in my blood, I’ve moved away from IL, but put a Telnet BBS up a while back and still mess around with it, called The Midnight-Club BBS.

I remember the first bbs I called in S Florida back in 1986 called “The Cave” I think it was run out of a Radio Shack store. The sysop was named Starshine and it was so cool when she’d ‘chat’ with me. I thought it was the coolest thing ever (it actually was at that moment in my life). That was back when you actually needed a bit of computer literacy to use a computer.